The Kansei semantic space in children's clothing

When designers begin to create new product, they need to explore on new shapes or elements that represent the consumer preferences which will account not only the tangible demands but also the subjective preferences. In this research, we give our attention to the design of female children's clothing in the context of urban wear from the age of one till six years old in Malaysia by the implementation of Kansei Engineering methodology. Reported in this paper is the result of the initial study, which aim to investigate the emotional design preferences of the perceived images or objects of children's clothing and investigate how these personal preferences work to the desirable products. It is part of our future objective to develop intelligent web based system that account for emotional acquisition on the clothing design attributes. It is believed the emotional desire elicited by the consumer can influence what constitute quality design and the decision to purchase a product. The main objective of this exploratory study is to investigate associations between consumer's subjective emotional responses towards children's clothing so that similar dimension could be summarized. The outcome will result to more objective emotional dimension analyzed by Correlation Coefficient Analysis, in which 40 dimension of emotions are identified. The research concludes that this dimension of emotion could be used in describing the design of children's wear which evoke the children's sensibility and psychological feelings of pleasurable and desirable.